New Courses

SPRING 2019

*************NEW COURSES FOR SPRING 2019*************

Choreographing Race In America

DNCE BC 3002

T&TH 11:40-12:55

Prof. Seth Williams

​This introductory lecture course tells the history of race in 20th- and 21st-century America, indeed queries the very concept of race, by focusing on contributions by artists of color to ballet, movie musicals, music videos, experimental dance, and more. How does dance express everything from “yellow peril,” to red power, to black joy? How do specific choreographies help to produce racial and ethnic identities? In exploring these questions, the course treats “choreography” as a broad conceptual category illuminating the role of moving bodies in histories of immigration and segregation, empowerment and civil rights, and shows what new vantages the study of choreography can contribute to critical race theory.

Seeing the Body: Movement and Physicality in Modern Visual Culture will examine how concepts of movement, space, and time gained an outsized role in photographic and cinematic experimentation, typography, interior design and exhibition, contributing a choreographic voice to the interwar age.

Our course will incorporate texts, images, and films connected to the fields of Dance History, Art History and Urban Studies. Beginning with a study of how nineteenth century industrialization and urbanization laid the foundations for the physical articulations of the early twentieth century, we will consider both avant-garde and popular visual phenomena to gain wider perception and a deeper understanding of interwar cultural expression, and how visual expressions of physicality are reflected in our current digital age.

This course re-conceives interactive media as a form of choreographic intervention. Instead of asking how dancers can control media, we will turn the tables to ask how interactive systems can influence movement. To accomplish this, choreographers will learn to apply computational thinking to choreography and programmers will learn to apply choreographic thinking to computation.

FALL 2018

********NEW COURSE FOR FALL 2018********

Music for Dance will familiarize students with elements of music and structural concepts from a wide range of musical practices with emphasis on the Western cannon, highlighting historical and theoretical points of intersection between the two fields. Students will acquire a working knowledge of music theory, ear training and music literature and apply their musical understanding to compositional and performative modalities of movement. The course combines lecture, readings, listening assignments, and studio practice to develop creative music-literate approaches to choreography.

SPRING 2018
UPDATED COMPOSITION COURSE!

Composition: Site Specific and Experimental Methods will cultivate an awareness of the dynamic relationship between our dancing body and the world we inhabit. Students develop individual and collaborative movement based projects that respond to physical sites and ecological concepts. Readings include historical and contemporary examples of site-specific performance, theories of art, ecology, climate change, and practices of resistance. Students utilize experimental compositional methods to challenge static notions of time, space, and the illusion of the discrete self.

NEW SEMINARSpring 2017
Digital Footprints: Archival/New Media research at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
BC3985
4 pts.
Thursdays 11am-12:50pm (meets on campus and at the NYPL for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center)
Limited Enrollment. To apply, see http://bt.barnard.edu/digitalfootprints/
Questions to Prof. Scolieri pscolier@barnard.edu

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This seminar is designed to introduce students to digital humanities in the performing arts. Class will meet on campus and at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center to experiment with integrating archival and new media research methods and developing innovative multi-media scholarly compositions. In so doing, students will gain a critical overview of digital humanities initiatives within the performance and film studies, as well as acquire skills in digital literacy (videographic analysis and annotation, new media research design, and online publication).

Limited enrollment: 12 students.

*This course is sponsored by the Barnard Teaches: Real Place + Digital Access initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation and offered in conjunction with Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and the Columbia University Center for Teaching and Learning.